Ok I'm deffinatly not sure if I should post this here, but I have looked all over for help and can't find a thing! I'm currently enrollled in a Programming Logic and Design course, we have only read 3 chapters, and the teacher wnats us to write pseudocode. I don't know how to do any of this! I'm read these chapters so many times and I understand how to read the pseudocode, and even can find errors, but I just can't figure out how to start from scratch! Soo I need some help on this, I'm not asking for the answer, just maybe how to start? I'd really appreciate it.

8) All in a Day’s Work is a temporary employment agency. The manager needs to determine how much tax to withhold for each employee. This withholding amount computes as 20 percent of each employee’s weekly pay. The weekly pay is the hourly pay time 40. A) Design an interactive screen that displays an employee’s weekly pay and withholding amount. The user inputs the hourly pay rate for an employee. Draw the flowchart or write the pseudocode for this program.B) Design a printed report titled WITHOLDING FOR EACH EMPLOYEE. Input fields include the first and last names of each employee, hourly pay, weekly pay, and withholding amount per week. Draw the flowchart or write the pseudocode for this program.
For (B) I have this, but I'm sure I did it incorrect, and I don't even know where to start on (A). I tired to get teh teacher to help me, but hes a grumpy old man and doesn't want anything to do with his students.

The main thing about pseudocode (academic nonsense aside) is that it's a flexible tool intended to get your thoughts straight about how the program is going to work without tying you up in all the tedious syntax rules that compilers can insist on and that can distract you from what you're trying to do.

In fact I'd even suggest that the pseudocode above is too detailed. We don't need to know what type employeeWeekly is; that will be obvious from the context. Unless there's a reason for specifying it just leave it out. Also if we just said FOOT = “END OF REPORT” then it would be obvious that FOOT was some kind of character/string type.

It doesn't need to look much like program code. Just write your thoughts out in a semi structured way. If you think of something that should be "inserted", just draw arrows indicating the flow.

So in a way it's similar to flowcharting, although even flowcharting has its "syntax rules" that can get in the way.

So there are no rules really. I can't tell you how to write pseudocode just as I can't tell you how to write your reply to this comment. Just write out how you think the program is going to work, then by looking over that you can "debug" it and get the ideas straight. Once you've got the ideas straight you can then translate it into program code step by step and hopefully it should work without too much hassle. As with everything the more experience you have the more "correct" the pseudocode will be, so the only way to learn is by doing it and translating it into code.

For what it's worth I think your teacher knows his stuff. Pseudocode is really useful. And maybe being grumpy is just a way to get you to do your own work.